


i missed you more than i thought i would

by theseourbodies



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Angst, Future Fic, Gen, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-07
Updated: 2018-04-16
Packaged: 2018-09-07 02:45:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8780083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theseourbodies/pseuds/theseourbodies
Summary: Steve goes on a mission after the team officially retires. His going isn't easy; after two years, Steve comes home to try and fix the mess that he's made.
Or,It wasn't that Steve left. It's that he left without asking them to come with him.





	1. i've moved further than i thought i could

**Author's Note:**

> Alex O. has announced his intention to leave the series after season 7 or 8, so I've been thinking a lot about the team retiring. This story is a little disjointed and incomplete, but the important thing to note is that the team is no longer officially a part of the Five-O task force.
> 
> _This series is set a few years after mid season 6, and ignores subsequent canon_

Steve doesn’t expect there to be anyone there when he arrives at Honolulu International, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t hoping; when he catches sight of Kono in the crowd, there’s a little shiver of relief that goes through him. He walks over cautiously, feeling every single one of the egg shells he’s walking on. As soon as he gets close enough to her she pulls him in tightly, clutches at him with a suspiciously wet-sounding sigh into his shoulder. Steve is no better; he has to shut his suddenly misty eyes and try to breathe evenly against his profound sense of relief.

He’d made sure they all had known he was coming back, coming home. No surprises; he owed the team that much. Steve hadn’t gotten any responses except from Grover, but that was… well, not alright, but expected. His going hadn’t been easy and he hadn’t exactly been able to keep regular contact on the go—the fact that at first he hadn’t been especially motivated to talk to any of them had meant he had lost the easy chances to get in touch with them; a fact that had hurt keenly later in the mission when an unfamiliar homesickness had made a mess of his nights and started to haunt his long hours alone on the search. He’d spent a lot of dream hours stuck in not-really-memories of the team, of his family. 

Kono pulls away too soon, and she smiles ruefully. “Welcome home,” she says, and Steve blows out a gusty breath.

“It’s good to be back,” he responds easily, and doesn’t take issue with her sudden pinched expression.

Kono takes his duffel, ignoring his token protests; Steve hikes his backpack higher on his shoulders and lets her lead the way outside. The sunshine is just the same as he remembers, always so different from any other sun he’s ever been under, sending something thrumming through him he used to be so wary of; something good and pure and comfortable that had secretly scared him a little with how familiar it could be. Kono’s car is waiting at the curb under the supervision of security agent whose grin is enough like Kono’s to mark him as some kind of relative. The man doesn’t say anything, just tips his hat to the two of them and goes to hassle a young couple kissing in front of a running car that’s blocking the lane. The car is still the same practical red Chevy, one of Kono’s boards strapped to the top and her gear packed neatly to the side of the trunk to make room for Steve’s baggage. He wonders if she talked about this with Chin and Danny, if they all made this decision together, but he bites back the question and just gets quietly into the passenger seat and lets her navigate the airport traffic in silence. 

At length, he says, “Thank you,” very quietly. Kono clenches her hands on the steering wheel tightly, and then visibly makes them relax. 

“…Anytime, Steve,” she says, and it’s nothing like warm; he just closes his eyes with quiet relief anyway.  
\--  
Catherine had fallen off the grid sometime during her last assignment, and a slick-suited liaison had approached Steve about it sometime in early September. Due to his previous relationship with her and his experience in search and retrieval, the NSA had officially extending an offer to consult with a search team to find her, and what was there to say to that. What else was he supposed to do. 

Two years to find her, five additional months to effectively negotiate her release from the prison she was being held in, and when he finally has Cath close enough to touch he can’t seem to make himself say what he had so desperately needed to, to do what he thought he wanted to. They lay side by side on the bed in the hotel room he had gotten for them, laying like they used to when they were both younger and sex-stupid and so happy. Cath is so small and warm beside him, her head tucked under his chin, but there’s an unfamiliar distance between them even now, a widening gap full of all the things they’ve been through since those first long, sun-lit mornings in the Hawaiian sun. 

He wants to touch her like he used to, strip her down and touch her like she thinks he should, just to make sure she’s real and with him. He watches the sun come up through the curtains instead, listens to her breathing, and tries not to think of Hawaii.


	2. talk some sense to me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Why Steve left and what he's heading towards now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter refers to and deals with fallout from a conversation between Danny and Cath in episode 6.03 which, honestly, I was a little worried I had hallucinated. Thankfully it's real and it really happened, huzzah

Steve doesn’t know how to start talking to Kono, feels out of his depth already in the long silence tucked into the white noise of the running car, but he can’t _not_ ask. Not after all this time. 

“How have you been?” The ‘you’ goes beyond Kono, and he trusts her to know that. Even when they had made the decision to step back and find new members for the task force, the team had still been a unit. If it feels foreign to say ‘you’ and mean all of them but Steve, he doesn’t let himself acknowledge it.

Kono looks at him out of the corner of her eye, mouth held in a grim line. “I can’t be your cheat sheet here, Steve. You have to take care of this on your own.”

There are slight, miniscule gaps in the flow of conversation where Steve keeps expecting her to say ‘brah’ or ‘boss,’ or even ‘McGarrett.’ Steve had thought he had run all the scenarios before he left to hunt for Catherine, thought he had calculated all the risks there were to calculate; it was disturbing but, he figured, inevitable that of course there were still things that he could lose, things he never thought he could miss in the first place. 

Steve thinks about apologizing, not for the first time. As always, he wonders if he could make himself mean it.

“You fucked up, with Chin. That’s… I just need you to realize that. You’re like his own flesh and blood, Steve, and you know what that means to him.” Kono has to stop, take some deep breaths. “Maybe you were gone from the islands for too long, before you came back,” she says, “because otherwise you would know that we don’t throw around ohana like it’s a catch phrase on a t-shirt. You were ours, Steve. You brought it all together, and after all of that, everything we’ve done for one another…. I know I was mad, for a long time. Chin was… it took Chin a while to work out how he felt about you, the both of you.”

And that’s unexpected, another consequence he hadn’t anticipated. “What? Danny, why would he be upset with Danny?”

Kono just shakes her head, looking at him directly as they come to a stop at a light. “You were the one who left, Steve, but Danny didn’t stop you from going.”

Steve looks down at his hands, clasped loosely in his lap. He remembers how angry he had been at Danny, but only distantly, like trying to remember what it felt like to be sick even though, in the moment, you had thought you could never forget. He fidgets with his own fingers and shakes off the old shame. “I would have hurt him if he had tried, Kono,” he whispers, still looking down. 

“ _Please_ ,” Kono says harshly “as if the threat of _pain_ has ever stopped Danny when it comes to you.”

Steve flinches, and they drive on in silence for a little longer.

\--

He has his hands all wrapped up in Danny’s shirt front, hauling Danny up towards him. There’s something furious pounding away in the front of his head, howling for violence, for blood. 

Steve’s voice is steady though, when he asks through his teeth, “What do you mean you told her? What did you say to her Danny?”

Danny has gone from guilty and stricken to guilty and stubborn in the time it took Steve to get up in his face, get his hands in Danny’s shirt. Steve shakes him, feeling wild. _“What did you say to her Danny.”_

“What I thought she needed to hear,” Danny hisses through his own clenched teeth. “You had a _ring_ , Steve, you were gonna ask her to _marry you_ and I just needed to talk to her about what that meant!” He wrenches away from Steve and crosses his arms tight across his chest. “Look, a blind man could see what it did to you every time she left without saying how long she was going for. And that’s no way to live a life, no way to have a relationship with somebody. So I, yeah, I went to talk to her about it. I just told her what I thought she needed to hear, ok, what she hadn’t considered already.”

Steve holds himself in check by sheer force of will, trying to get where the hell Danny is going with this, trying to figure out why Danny had sounded so _guilty_ before, when he had--clearly accidentally--brought it up, before Steve had lost it.

Danny looks… miserable, and there’s a red haze blurring at the edge of Steve’s vision. “Danny,” he growls, “what the _hell_ \--”

“I didn’t think… Steve you have to believe me I thought she was a sure thing. I thought you both were in it for forever, I thought you had bought that stupid ring because you were _sure_. So, I went and I told her--”

“You told her about the _ring?_ ” Steve asks, horrified and furious.

“Shut _up_ , no. I just met with her and I told her you were serious and that her leaving and coming back was killing you. I just, I asked her to think about it,” Danny sounds exhausted, “she could either stay here, for good, or she could leave for good.” 

Steve’s mind goes completely blank for a split second, the bottom dropping out of the world underneath him.

“Steve, Steve, please, _I didn’t think she would choose leave._ I didn’t expect in a million years that was what she would do.” 

Steve just stares at him and Danny, damn him, just lifts his chin and looks him right in the eye.

“I didn’t know she would leave but I’m not sorry I talked to her. As great as she was, as much as I liked her, she had to know what she was doing to you.” Danny says softly, so softly. “She had to know.”

Something delicate snaps between them and Steve is _screaming_ “What, because you’re such an _expert_ Danny, on what a marriage _takes_ , how to make a relationship _work?_ What the hell do you know about Cath and me, what the hell could you _possibly_ know about how we work!?” Displays of unchecked aggression go against every principle drilled into his body, but Steve wants to smash something anyway for a single, crystalline moment, wants to take all this rage out on something that won’t, can’t fight back. He paces instead, back and forth and back again.

Still where Steve left him, a little rough looking with his shirt half untucked and his stupid, sad, _understanding_ eyes, Danny says, “I know _you,_ Steve. Better than anybody.”

Steve wants to hit him then, break his jaw, black his eye, because there is _so little in life_ that Steve has really let himself have, barely anything at all. If it means that Catherine never gets that ultimatum, that fucking _presumptuous_ ultimatum, then he wants Danny gone, wants him out, wants to go back to that day in the rain and go find Chin Ho instead and leave Danny Williams in his miserable apartment. Maybe then, _maybe then_ he could permanently get rid of this awful twist of fate altogether.

Steve is so tired of _losing things._

“’Better than anybody’ can still mean barely at all,” Steve says harshly, aiming to wound and watching it hit the mark with satisfaction. “I’m going to go find her Danny. She needs my help, and _I’m going to find her._ ” _And bring her back and tell her I’ll take her, no matter what. I will, I’ll do it._

Danny’s chin hits his chest as he leans up against the wall, breathing hard. When he looks up he stares blankly over Steve’s shoulder. “Fine,” he says, voice hard with resignation. “Tell the team yourself this time.”

Danny disappears out the door and Steve starts to pack furiously, putting everything out of his mind but what he needs for the mission, this inevitable decision he’s about to make. Because it is inevitable--going after Catherine is a mission three years overdue, he understands that now. 

It’s the last time he talks to Danny for two and a half years.


	3. i'll use you as a warning sign

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Getting there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is dedicated, with all my love and respect, to the anon who asked me on tumblr A YEAR AGO if I was going to finish this story. I am, and I think I'm in a space to do that now. Thank you so much to everyone who liked and commented on this story. This isn't much of an update, but I hope you enjoy!

Between milemarkers 65 and 67, Steve decides. He needs to drop his bags and then he needs to start dropping some of this _baggage._ He might not be able to see Danny right away—he might not be able to bring himself to cross that bridge, even if Danny can even stand to meet with him. He’s too scared to see if what was between them has been scorched in his wake. But if Chin will see him, Steve thinks that that’s the place to start. But first-- “Kono,” he says to his knees, “could you take me home?” 

“Of course.” Kono smiles reluctantly when he looks her way. “Home base, right? That’s probably a good idea.” She drums her fingers against the wheel, very lightly, and then says in a rush: “Ok. Ok, so I know I said that you don’t get a cheat sheet, and you don’t.” She takes a breath. “But I know that Chin’s usually home early, these days; if you wanted to visit him, he wouldn’t mind.”  
“Yeah?” 

She hesitates visibly, and he can see the tension in her shoulders and her flexing grip on the wheel. Steve doesn’t want to ask her for more than this, doesn’t want to push, but something in him is hungry for even a tiny piece of reassurance; he waits with bated breath.  


“Yeah,” Kono finally says, “yeah, I think he’d really like that.” She releases a shuddering breath and continues in a small, quiet voice, “I know I liked it. Being able to just—see you again.”  


His own breath leaves him in a rush. Relieved, his head tips back against the headrest; the silence that stretches between the two of them now is more comfortable than it was before.  


There are still things that Steve needs to know; in the car, it feels easier to just let himself ask and not have to look her in the eye and see her expressions unless he wants to. Instead of letting the companionable quiet get too thick between them, Steve steels himself and asks, “Hey Kono?”  


She hums, glances at him fast. They’ve left the highway and the trees are getting older and infinitely more recognizable; even the sky as Kono takes him closer and closer to home seems more familiar, warmer on his cool skin. So close to home, he feels a wave of cowardice; he wants to just ask her if he can roll the window down to feel the air on his face.  


Instead, he makes himself say, “What about Danny?” like he knows he should.  


It takes her a long time to answer as she navigates the shade-dappled streets. “I talked to him when we got your message, that you were headed ho—that you were coming back,”Kono murmurs. “In the end, he had the same decision to make as I did; he told me he needed some time to decide. When he called, he wasn’t sure he wanted to come back right away,” she says.  


_Come back,_ Steve thinks, numbly. There are, Steve knows, worse things she could have told him. He sucks in a trembling breath. There are less terrible things to hear; he knows there are.  


Steve takes a steadying breath, deep from his belly and out through his nose steadily, trying to calm his body down, trying not to—to cry, maybe. Danny had always talked like there was barely anything holding him to the island, but Steve hadn’t thought that he would be enough to make Danny _leave._ In his rarest, truly honest moments, Danny had made it seem like the team had been the connection that had kept him here, the team and the way that his daughter had flourished like a native here. Steve had thought he’d considered all the consequences of his going; somehow, Danny leaving the hadn’t even seemed like is was possible.  


“So, he left?” Steve makes himself ask. His family home comes closer and closer, Kono’s car slowly eating up the distance. He balls up his fists in the fabric over his knees and waits for her to tell him that he’s made a mess of things even worse than he could have imagined.  


“Yeah, but he’ll be—oh, oh shit,” Kono says suddenly. She cuts into the drive sharply, stops hard, and reaches for one of Steve’s tight fists. “To _Maui_ , Steve. He took Grace up to Maui before her school year starts, he hasn’t—he’s still _here._ ”  


It doesn’t… register at first, what she’s saying. He’s so prepared for the worst that there’s an endless moment where all he can hear is one of his worst fears coming true. Danny, gone, the fault firmly on Steve.  


“Steve!” Kono shakes him with a hand on his shoulder, and his head snaps up. He meets her eyes, watches her mouth say: “Danny still lives here, he didn’t leave. Steve? _Boss._ We’re all here, we were waiting for you. We’re _here._ ”  


“Shit,” Steve breaths, staring at her _“Shit.”_  


Kono leans back, but she doesn’t let him go. Her hand twists his shirt up in her grip without malice, then smooths it when she realizes what she’s doing. “Sorry,” she says shakily, “I didn’t think about how it sounded. I didn’t think—”  


He doesn’t need her to finish the sentence. He thinks it hadn’t occurred to her, either, that that might have been something that could have happened. “Me neither,” he whispers, cutting her off, “me neither, not until just now.” He doesn’t _want_ to think about it anymore, honestly. Steve clears his throat, pops the door open and swings out. “Pop your trunk for me?” he asks, and doesn’t think about how rough his voice sounds, how he must have looked to make her panic like she had.  


Kono complies without saying anything else; she sweeps in to grab Steve’s biggest bag again—he doesn’t bother protesting this time—and together they make their way to the front door. Steve’s had the keys in his pocket since he made it through security at Narita International, and the bundle jangles when he pulls them out—house, Mercury, truck, the arms locker at Five-O’s offices in the Palace; six years of his life held in the palm of his hand—and finds the comfortable weight of the house key by feel alone. The deadbolt snaps back, and the handle turns stiffly in his hand, and for the first time in too long, Steve finally comes home.


End file.
